Founders Can Over-Inspire Teams Into Mutual Delusion
David Senra · The Relentless Missionary Creating AGI: Demis Hassabis · Apr 1, 2026 · at 23:26
David Senra quotes DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis from Sebastian Mallaby's biography, reflecting on the failure of Hassabis's first startup, Elixir Studios.
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“Who would have thought that you can actually inspire people too much, he said. Well, you can, because you can get to the point where you're deluding your team, and then they are deluding you also. It's like I'm making this judgment that this is possible because the engineers are telling me it's possible, but they're only telling me it's possible because I've over inspired them, Demis said. So in fact, none of us were getting real feedback.”
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